Planners and developers sometimes complain that permit delays or nagging issues city officials raise are garbage. Neil Richardson can certainly make that case.

He’s building — or at least trying to build — one of the most unusual offerings in an ever-changing downtown. It’s the first mechanized parkade in Calgary, with a rooftop restaurant above robot-stacked cars and revitalized heritage storefronts along a notoriously shabby block of 7th Avenue S.W., between Centre and 1st Street S.W.

Richardson has missed this construction season thanks to a permit process that normally takes three to six months stretching past nine months — because of trash bins.

It isn’t his project’s garbage that has gummed up the approval process. It’s the laneway Dumpsters of his back-lane neighbours, which he said shouldn’t be there in the first place. And for Richardson’s council-approved Seventh Avenue Autopark, the alley is the only way to reach a parkade between pedestrian-only Stephen Avenue and transit-only 7th Avenue.

“This is ridiculous. The bylaw says you’re not supposed to have Dumpsters in the back lane. We can’t access our site off 7th Avenue,” Richardson said. “So you’ve completely landlocked us.”

The inner-city heritage developer is hopeful he’ll find resolution with development authorities next week, figuring out a way to clear the lane of waste and recycling bins and develop a large communal bin on the parkade’s land for Stephen Avenue restaurants and business without room on their properties.

But Richardson is baffled it took this long, and was about to threaten an appeal over the delay.

After working on complex historical restoration projects such as the Lougheed House and Ramsay’s Snowdon Building, he’s familiar with the hiccups and tough requests that come with permit approvals.

He faced years of challenges with this project, which violates the city’s restrictive parking policies and drew traffic concerns from transportation planners. Council gave Richardson special zoning permission to build the 388-car parkade and 15-storey building around it, because parking revenues would let him restore the century-old buildings that line 7th Avenue.

But he finds it “absolutely, absolutely unusual” that someone else’s trash bins on public property became the final layer of red tape — especially since they shouldn’t be there in the first place. An e-mail from a city transportation engineer states none of his neighbours has explicit permission to store bins in the lane, and said officials will work toward bylaw compliance.

“It’s not like we’re saying, hey, let’s put a bunch of Dumpsters in the back lane to make it ugly. We’re saying the reverse,” Richardson said.

Pooja Thakore, a city transportation spokeswoman, said officials are looking at solutions to provide room in the lane for parkade users, emergency vehicles and other users, with or without bins sharing the space.

She disputed Richardson’s assertion the permit process has been excessive.

“It is actually a first for the city, to have this type of parkade,” she said. “So we want to make sure we are looking at all the areas, nuances and complexities of this file.”

But some planning department officials appear to have also been frustrated over what Richardson calls city “inertia.” Nine months after Richardson applied for the development permit, he could treat it as a “deemed refusal” and challenge it at the city’s subdivision and appeal board.

“Your DP would go the SDAB and no doubt cause massive embarrassment to Calgary Roads and Transportation, as well as Planning,” wrote downtown-area planning co-ordinator Richard Goecke, in an April e-mail provided to the Herald.

“I am not suggesting this is the card to play yet, but if we do not get any movement in the next 2 weeks I would not blame you one bit for taking that action.”

While he is confident a solution will come soon, Richardson is unhappy that his years-long regulatory journey on this project is still going, and that he can’t yet start construction this summer.

“Next year will cost us more to build than this year. That’s a given.”

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